While you were probably busy gearing up for the long weekend, Slingshot’s Millie Di Maio and Kaia Webber were busy battling it out at the Young Spikes Asia Media Competition in Singapore. However, the duo still had time to reflect on their experience and kindly provided B&T with this…

System 1 thinking tells us that people think less than we think they do (Kahneman D., Thinking Fast and Slow). This was the insight that unlocked the strategy for an incredibly tough B2B brief we were given with zero media budget in the Young Spikes Asia Media Competition.

After coming up for air following the intense 24-hour turnaround, we began reflecting on how this insight can be applied across our entire industry. Us media folk are proud of the work we produce, and so we should be! But with consumers exposed to 3,000 advertising messages a day, sometimes we can forget the value of simplicity; a discipline we tried really hard to apply to our Silver-awarded response.

The competition format forced us to distil the challenge, insight, strategy, execution and rationale into ten slides in a five-minute presentation. Talk about cutting to the chase! If only all our media responses to clients could be this succinct.

A key to simplicity is leveraging existing behaviour. It’s much easier to get a consumer to do something that’s within their routine than to create a completely new behaviour. This was the approach we took with our response when tasked with targeting senior business executives.

Our way in was golf. Why golf? Well 90 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs play golf, and the 19th hole is a well-known locale for business negotiations, so their motivation was high and it acted as the lure we needed to grab their attention. But this wasn’t any ordinary day on the green…

The brief challenged us to raise awareness of poor water and sanitation in the Asia Pacific with senior executives to encourage participation in multi-sector partnerships to address the issue in the region.

To drive the point home (no pun intended), we partnered with Singapore’s finest, Laguna National Golf Course, transforming the course via a world first activation. Think rubbish-strewn ponds, off-limit bubblers due to poor water condition, and caddies handing our contaminated water bottles with hard-hitting stats about water and sanitation on the labels.

Coupled with a smart media partnership to scale the execution, our solution confidently delivered on the objectives of the brief. We also took away the value of a partnership mindset; having each other to counsel us through the stressful 24 hours and knowing the exact time we needed to step away from the laptop for a butter chicken break was key.

A big thanks to Slingshot and News Corp for allowing us this amazing opportunity. It was an incredible experience going head-to-head with some of the brightest minds in the industry. To all the young guns, make sure you sign up for Cannes Young Lions next year – you won’t regret it! Now time to see if we can present all our ideas in five minutes…

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